Honoring the best documentaries of 2019, the Critics Choice Association will name their winners on November 10th.

The Critics Choice Association (formerly Broadcast Film Critics Association and Broadcast Television Journalists Association) has announced its nominees for the 4th Annual Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards. John Chester‘s The Biggest Little Farm received the most nominations with seven, including one for Best Documentary Feature.

This year’s nominees, which were selected by a committee of CCA members led by our own founding editor, Christopher Campbell, are spread over 15 competitive categories plus one special group of honored subjects. The top award has 11 contenders, while other categories have more than the usual number of nominees. This is clearly a reflection on how great a year it’s been for documentaries.

Docs that haven’t even released yet with nominations include National Geographic’s The Cave, Showtime’s The Kingmaker, and Serendipity, the last of which is nominated for as one of the alternatives selections in the Most Innovative Documentary category. Other unique docs competing there include Screwball, Aquarela, and Martin Scorsese‘s hybrid Bob Dylan film Rolling Thunder Revue.

This year the CCDAs introduced a category recognizing the year’s best short documentaries, with 10 nominees representing a variety of mostly online outlets, including Field of Vision, the New York Times‘ Op-Docs, and of course Netflix, which has its Oscar winnerPeriod. End of Sentence, which released publicly in 2019, contending here.

Other new categories honor score, and narration — which recognizes both the performer of the narration and the writers behind its script — plus such subgenres as archival, biographical, and science/nature films. The CCDAs now have an opportunity to showcase a broader variety of nonfiction cinema.

And speaking of new honors, the CCDA lifetime achievement award is now called the D A Pennebaker Award, and that’s being given to the legendary Frederick Wiseman. Another new special honor, the CCDA Landmark Award, will go to Michael Apted for his more than 50 years of work on the Up series, which continued this year with 63 Up.